1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a hard disk drive, and more particularly to a method and device for copying programs installed on the original hard disk drive into uninitialized hard disk drives.
2. Related Art
Generally, the hard disk drive (HDD) consists of a head/disk assembly (HDA) comprising mechanical constituent elements and a printed circuit board (PCB) comprising circuit elements, whereby a large amount of data can be magnetically stored on the disks and accessed at a great speed. Thus, such an arrangement is widely used as an auxiliary storage device for a computer system.
When duplicating the original HDD having a large number of installed programs, it takes a lot of time and manpower because disks must be installed after being formatted. Therefore, a method is employed, whereby the original HDD is copied into duplicating HDDs from sector to sector without performing the process of disk formatting and the initial program installation, but such a conventional method is possible only when the model of the duplicating HDDs is the same as that of the original HDD.
However, since the original and duplicating HDDs must be always of the same model and capacity when using the method referred to above and described in more detail below, there is a drawback in that the quantity of different original HDDs are required to be equal to the different models and capacities of the duplicating HDDs to be copied. This results in considerable expense.
Moreover, a further drawback resides in the fact that productivity deteriorates in implementation of the method referred to above because, when the models and capacities of the original and duplicating HDDs turn out to be different after mounting the duplicating HDD, the original HDD must be replaced with another one appropriate to the model and capacity of the duplicating HDD. This results in loss of time as well as further expense.
Therefore, there is a need in the prior art for development of an original HDD having a storage area divided into subareas which are equal in number to the number of different models of HDDs. There is also a need in the prior art for development of a method for dividing the storage area of an original HDD into sub-storage areas equal in number to the number of different models of HDDs so as to store the initial program of each of the sub-storage areas. Moreover, such a method should result in copying of the initial program from the sub-storage area into the appropriate duplicating HDDs when mounting a plurality of duplicating HDDs of different models.
The following patents are considered to be representative of the prior art relative to the present invention, and are burdened by the disadvantages discussed above, as well as additional disadvantages discussed herein: U.S. Pat. No. 5,652,863 for a Graphical Method Of Media Partitioning On A Hard Disk to Asensio et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,530,602 for a Disk Drive micromotion Starting Apparatus And Method to Boutaghou et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,465,343 for a Shared memory Array For Data Block And Control Program Storage In Disk Drive to Henson et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,430,845 for a Peripheral Device Interface For Dynamically Selecting Boot Disk Device Driver to Rimmer et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,980,783 for an Apparatus For Automatically Applying Servo Track Data To A Selected Servo Surface Of A Hard Disk Within A Hard Disk Assembly to Moir et al., and U.S. Pat. No. 4,736,341 for an Intelligent Hard Disk Drive Subsystem to Redmond et al.